I am furious and cannot keep silent any longer. For those who are not aware, there has been a series of suicides over the last few weeks with a common theme: people who were being harassed for their sexuality. We all (or at least should) remember Matthew Shepard, the gay student at the University of Wyoming who was brutally beaten and left on a split-rail fence in the middle of nowhere to die.
His horrific death prompted a wave of hate-crime awareness and led to attempts to codify anti-hate crime legislation in the form of the Matthew Shepard Act. This was in 1998. This act wasn’t passed until 2009. Why?
Because our nation does not view gay and lesbian people as human beings deserving of equality and acceptance.
It’s been 12 years since Shepard’s gruesome death, and one might think progress has been made in the area of protection against hate crimes. Well, it hasn’t.
The nation was shocked in February 2008 when Lawrence King, a 15-year-old middle school student, was shot in the head by a 14-year-old student while at school. He was shot because he had attempted to befriend someone who had been taught that gay people were evil, that gay people were not human. This prompted another wave of media coverage and lent enough credence to get the Matthew Shepard Act passed in 2009.
Once again, the nation could sweep this issue under the rug because gay and lesbian people had gotten their protection, and we could go back to worrying about the latest season of “American Idol.”
Lawrence King has faded from the collective mind of the public, and new issues occupy our attention. Yet again, the issue of anti-gay harassment raises its brutish head, in an even more shocking event.
This time, an 11-year-old student hanged himself. There are people on this campus with children around that age. How would you feel, parents, if you came home and your child had killed himself or herself? How would you feel, especially, if you knew of the issue that caused this and had repeatedly notified your child’s school, but the school did nothing to stop this harassment?
This is what happened in Massachusetts in April 2009.
Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, unable to bear the load of daily torment by his classmates, took his own life. His mother notified the school weekly leading up to this, pleading with it to step in and stop this harassment.
All this does is say to survivors, “Your child was not worthy of protection, and your child is not worthy of remembrance.”
I’m going to list some names of children who are now dead because of harassment based on their sexual orientation. July 9, Justin Aaberg, 15,
Minnesota, hanged himself after continual harassment at school. Sept. 9, Billy Lucas, 15, Indiana, hanged himself after being constantly tormented at school, with the full knowledge of the administration. Sept. 19, Seth Walsh, 13, California, hanged himself after being forced to transfer schools due to harassment over his sexuality. Sept. 22, Tyler Clementi, 18, freshman at Rutgers University, New Jersey, jumped from a bridge after his roommate broadcast him being intimate with another man over his Facebook and Twitter feed. Sept. 23, Asher Brown, 13, Texas, shot himself in the head after continual harassment at school. Sept. 29, Raymond Chase, 19, openly gay sophomore at Johnson and Wales University, Rhode Island, hanged himself in unknown circumstances in his dorm room.
Did we take any impact from Matthew Shepard? From Larry King? From Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover? Did we change the casual nature of homophobic slang in our culture? Did we recognize we needed to do something about this issue? No.
Now we have six more deaths on our hands. Six children dead for senseless, thoughtless reasons. Let this be a lesson to us all. Words and actions have real-world consequences. Let us not have these children lose their lives in vain.
I hope you will join me in an effort to stop harassment, stop violence and let the families of these children and other children who are struggling with the same issues know we are committed to finding a solution to this increasingly dangerous problem.
We cannot let another child die because of our negligence.
